It won't outdraw the Stones or Hannah Montana, but the "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" should be just as electrifying.

It's a bipartisan band of Washington budget wonks, headlined by the retiring Comptroller General David Walker, with a basic message: This country is headed toward a financial train wreck that Washington won't face.

Fractured politics are begetting the worst possible results: ever-rising costs for safety-net programs such as Medicare and Social Security while leaders dodge the long-term consequences. That's the central message of the doomsday crew making the rounds of college campuses, lunch groups and newspaper editorial boards.

The band leader is Walker, who runs the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency that examines federal programs. He's partly what you expect: an accountant you might ask for tax tips at a really boring barbecue.

The problem, they argue, may be snooze-inducing but it's unavoidable. A total of 62 percent of the $3 billion federal budget runs on autopilot with these entitlement programs

The biggest concern is health care. Enrollments will rise as the country ages, and health care costs will race ahead at yearly double-digit rates of increase. Over the next 75 years, Medicare will outstrip its fees and premiums by $34 trillion. This is no argument against universal health care - it's an argument against adding benefits and enrollees and flipping the bill to future taxpayers.

Washington budget writers know these numbers. But the fixes are political nonstarters that rally voters and go nowhere. Democrats generally suggest higher taxes to maintain the rising cost of benefits. Republicans want to take a wrecking ball to the system such as President Bush's plan for private pension money to supplement Social Security.

Nobody - be it voter or politico - much cares about this impasse because the deadline is decades away and the numbers are bizarrely big. Walker's favorite: Every child born in this country enters the world owing $175,000 in retirement bills.

What if this present financial trough deepened, cutting into taxes, and lenders, such as China, shied away from buying billions in Treasury bills to finance yearly deficits? Economic chaos would follow.

The Wake Up tour members have a modest plan, already contained in several bills before Congress. Form a bipartisan panel, let it study a range of solutions and produce a final result for Congress to pass on, once and for all. Each day of delay compounds the sacrifice that will be required down the road.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

This year, the initial wave of the 78 million Baby Boomers has qualified for Social Security. By 2010, the first Baby Boomers will qualify for Medicare. The impact on these entitlement programs will be profound - unless our elected officials are willing to address the coming gap between revenues and benefits. Consider these numbers:

-- The number of Americans age 65 and older is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years. The working-age population will grow only 10 percent during that same period.

-- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending accounts for 42 percent of the federal budget today.

-- The total cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will rise from about 8.4 percent of gross-domestic product today to 18.6 percent of GDP by 2050.